He saw himself as an alien settled on our planet: who is Alain Bosquet?
The defining feature of Alain Bosquet, who was born in Russia and spent his childhood in Belgium, escaped to the USA and saw the end of the war in Germany, and chose to live in Paris in France, is his longing to address the whole world in his poems.
Russian-born French poet and novelist. He wrote poems addressing universal issues. He was born on March 29, 1919 in Odessa. He used the name Anatole Bisk until he was twenty. In 1920, his family immigrated to Bulgaria. After living in poverty for a while in Varna and Sofia, they moved to Brussels in 1925. He graduated from the Athenee d'Uccle High School in 1937. He studied philosophy at Libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels) and the Sorbonne University. He was granted Belgian citizenship. He joined the army when Germany occupied Belgium in 1940, but at the end of the same year, when the armies of Belgium and France were disbanded, he decided to go to the USA. After a difficult journey through Europe and Havana, he arrived in New York in 1942. He began working for the pro-de Gaulle newspaper La Voix de France. In the fall of the same year, he joined the US Army and became a US citizen. At the war's end, he came to Normandy and Versailles with the American army. He resigned from his official duties in 1951 and settled in Paris, dedicating himself to literary studies. He wrote articles for various newspapers, gave conferences abroad, and prepared art and literature programs for television. Alain Bosquet won the Guillaume Apollinaire Prize for his book Larigue Morte (“Dead Language”) in 1952, the French Academy Grand Poetry Prize for his book Quatre testaments et autres poemes (“Four Testaments and Other Poems”) in 1968, and the Le Grand Poetry Prize in 1978. He also received the French Critics' Syndicate Award for his book Livre du doute et de la grâce (“The Book of Doubt and Lust”).
Alain Bosquet, born Anatoliy Bisk (28 March 1919 – 17 March 1998), was a French poet. He headed the jury of the Max Jacob Prize, the Académie Mallarmé and was a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.
The defining feature of Alain Bosquet, who was born in Russia and spent his childhood in Belgium, escaped to the USA and saw the end of the war in Germany, and chose to live in Paris in France, is that he sees himself as "a foreigner settled on our planet". For this reason, his longing to address the whole world is expressed in his poems. He tried to create pure poetry based on the element of sound, the independent powers of words, and all the objects that surround man, but based on incoherent images.